Although Bob Dylan’s music of the 1960s and 70s was highly acclaimed and vastly influential, by the mid 1980s his creativity had dipped so low that he was seriously thinking of retiring. Yet from the late ‘90s onwards he began to produce work that was comparable in quality to that of his heyday. The action in these extraordinary songs appears to take place in an indeterminate historical period, sometime between the American Civil War and the present day; in a mythic landscape of noisy, smoky honky tonks and juke joints; haunted by the ghosts of the great blues and country music legends, along with various long-lost crooners and torch singers.